News

Google Makes A Driverless Car   Wednesday 28 May

Google has been working on its driverless car project for some time now, but so far it has looked like an experimental alpha. Now there is beta and perhaps soon a release candidate.

Arduino Donations 2014   Wednesday 28 May

Arduino is planning to make donations totalling $300,000 to help promote open source projects this year and is asking the community to help identify the most suitable beneficiaries.

Skype Translator - Communication Without Language Barriers   Wednesday 28 May

Microsoft gave its first public demo of near real time voice translation that results from collaboration jointly developed by Microsoft researchers and Skype engineers. Although the demo of English - German translation has pauses and some obvious flaws, Satya Nadella's description of it as magical isn't far from the mark.

The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net   Tuesday 27 May

A recent paper with an innocent sounding title is probably the biggest news in neural networks since the invention of the backpropagation algorithm. But what exactly does it all mean?

AppCode 3.0   Tuesday 27 May

The latest version of AppCode, JetBrains IDE IDE for iOS and OS X developers, includes an integrated UI Designer as well as improvements in target management, code generation actions for TDD, and a plugin for Reveal, an iOS debugging tool.

What Does It Take To Get A Job At Google Revisited   Monday 26 May

Landing a job at Google is the stuff of dreams for many developers. True the odds are against you, as shown in this infographic from recruitment platform Staff.com. However, knowing what Google is looking for could help.

Code Hunt - New Coding Game From Microsoft Research   Monday 26 May

Code Hunt is an educational game which you can play in Java of C#. It entirely browser based so there's nothing to install and as you progress through its levels you learn more without having to type in more than a snippet of code.

OpenWorm Building Life Cell By Cell   Sunday 25 May

The nematode worm C. elegans is going where no worm has gone before - into cyberspace. The Open Worm project aims to build a complete and accurate simulation of the first animal to be transferred to code. 

Computational Camouflage Hides Things In Plain Sight   Saturday 24 May

You may have heard about the possibility of cloaking devices based on metamaterials but perhaps there is a simpler but cleverer way of merging with the background - computational camouflage.

Sixth SharePoint Connect Conference   Friday 23 May

November may seem a long way off, but if you are interested in SharePoint or Office 365 it's not too soon to plan to attend SharePoint Connect being held in Amsterdam on November 18 19 & 20, 2014.

OTTO - The Hackable Raspberry Pi GIF Camera   Friday 23 May

Otto is the first product to make use of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module and it is open, hackable and takes animated GIFs which are automatically uploaded to your phone. 

Chain Easy Bitcoin Development   Friday 23 May

The one thing you can rely on is that the Bitcoin API isn't easy to use for the non-specialist programmer. There are already libraries that make it easier, but Chain aims to create a Restful API that you can use from just about anywhere. 

Microsoft Backtracks on Kinect In Xbox One   Thursday 22 May

Microsoft recently announced that it is making the Xbox One console available without the Kinect, reversing a decision it made a year ago that the Kinect would be an integral part of the games platform. What does this mean for Kinect's future?

Chrome 35 Released   Thursday 22 May

The Chrome 35 beta was notable for several enhancements targeted at developers. It has now been promoted to the stable version, but not all of its features are included.

QScript A Quantum Computer In Your Browser   Thursday 22 May

Google's Chrome experiments are usually about impressive graphics, but this one takes us into the realm of quantum computing and this is about as esoteric as it gets. If you have ever wanted to try your hand at quantum algorithms, there is no longer an excuse.

The Core

Android Adventures - Managing Fragments   Thursday 22 May

You might know how to create a Fragment and how to display it but how to you deal with multiple Fragments in one Activity? The solution is to use the FragmentManager, but not quite in the way it is described in most examples.

Babbage's Bag

Power of Operators   Tuesday 27 May

This article  is more or less everything that the working programmer should know about operators and their associated expressions and, of course, the use of parentheses.